


strawberry clumps

by godlet



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Amazing Spider-Man (Movies - Webb)
Genre: Ableism, Ableist Language, Autism Spectrum, Autistic Peter, Bullying, Gen, Precious Peter Parker, Stimming, except he cant do that when his strength is x10, peter strategically fleeing the scene of the crime, peter's fav stim is pressure stim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-06 20:01:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6768082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/godlet/pseuds/godlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time after getting his powers, when Peter tries to open the ice cream carton, both lid and carton go flying out the kitchen window.</p><p>Obviously, he's going to have to work on that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	strawberry clumps

**Author's Note:**

> This goes really in-depth with what it's like to be autistic, not only in what it feels like to stim/not be allowed to stim as often as you need to and what it's like to be bullied/harassed for stimming/generally just being autistic.  
> Also kind of goes into sensory issues/overloads, but doesn't necessarily immediately equate these overloads with breakdowns. You can be overwhelmed and still be functional, it just isn't fun and makes you prone to more overloads or a full-on breakdown.
> 
> These descriptions do _not_ mean that every single autistic person goes through these exact same things, as people on the spectrum are all different in their traits. One person might be alright with loud noises, but react badly to certain frequencies, while others (like Peter) can't really handle loud noises in general.

.

“Peter? Are you in here?”

 

 _“Fish nuggets,”_ Peter hisses eloquently as he takes a running leap up over the counter and out the kitchen window, following the previously airborne carton of ice cream and its wayward lid to their concrete doom on the ground. In doing so, he narrowly avoids being spotted by his searching Aunt.

 

He, surprisingly, sticks the landing, leading him to jerk both his legs in physical shock at just how _easy_ it is before he’s suddenly on his back and rolling to the side with melting cargo clutched in his arms as he presses his body flush against the building like a guilty burrito.

 

“Where could that silly boy have gone off to now?” Aunt May says to herself worriedly from her position sticking her head out the window. Her vision swivels from one side to another, ineffectually scanning the sidewalk and the surrounding buildings but nothing more.

 

Peter hears the way she clicks her tongue as she retreats, shuffling from one end of the building to the other. He can tell, somehow, by the way she moves, that she is no longer outright searching for her characteristically absent nephew.

 

Letting out a big breath of air he didn’t know he was holding in, Peter spreads out on the pavement. The way his soft pajama pants catch on the rough pavement is sort of distracting, but not as distracting as the giant banana spider that he comes face-to-face with when he turns his head.

 

“Hey,” he whispers as if he wasn’t gripped with the kind of fear only a giant bug in close proximity can bring. “Come here often?”

 

The spider makes slightly threatening motions at him, which is to say that it makes any motion at all, so Peter rolls into a crouching position some ways away.

 

The last time he tried to fight a spider, he lost.

 

Given, it was a whole room of them, but he still lost quite badly.

 

Peter looks a bit morosely down at the container in his hands. Unfortunately, the top of the freshly bought ice cream has either been scraped away during its flight and subsequent landing or marked irrevocably by dirt.

 

“I could have had powers that helped me separate ice cream from not-ice cream,” he tells the banana spider as he stands as quietly as possible. He’s pleasantly surprised at just how quiet that is. “Instead, I got the power to be threatened by every spider I will ever meet.”

 

The supposedly benign spider makes another aggressive motion. Something tickles the back of Peter’s neck.

 

Peter nods a few times, lips tightly pressed together in a resigned expression as he sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “Yup.”

 

He ends up hiding the evidence of his little mishap – goodbye, morning frozen strawberry clumps, you will be rightly missed – in a neighboring trash can as he makes his way to the back of the house to climb into his bedroom window.

 

He will, of course, find the task to be about a hundred times easier than any time he can remember before.

 

“I wonder if I’ll ever stop being surprised,” he mumbles to himself as he swings one leg limply out the side of his window, the other pressed up underneath him in the only pressure stim he can think of that doesn’t involve breaking some hapless object with his newly enhanced strength.

.

* * *

 

.

Peter stopped being surprised several days ago.

 

Now he is just frustrated.

 

“Peter?” Gwen asks cautiously from her seat diagonally from him. “Peter? Are… are you alright? You look a little uhm… Tense.”

 

“Yea, I’m fine,” Peter responds a bit wide-eyed as his leg tries to jiggle its way through the floor and upend his vibrating desk.

 

“Oh, okay…” She nods, looking at him a bit mock-seriously as he begins nodding right along with her. She looks like a sarcastic bobble head. “Do you uh… do you want? Something?”

 

“Want – want what? What something?” Peter mumbles awkwardly, forcefully clamping his mouth shut in order to keep from babbling. His energy and control levels weren’t at their best right now – who knows what he would end up saying.

 

The bell rings, shrill and long and _painful,_ and Peter jumps up from his seat with a short yell that is drowned out by the shrieking. His chair topples over backwards, but his arm shoots out and snatches it before Gwen has even stood up.

 

Peter has to fight from clutching at his ears and bending over until he can shove his head between his knees. That’s not what a ‘normal’ acting person does.

 

“I was,” Gwen clears her throat as she comes to stand next to the rapidly finger-tapping Peter. “I was about to ask where your uhm…” her hand sort of winds itself up in the air as she searches for a word. “Your? Rubber toy was.”

 

Peter’s hand snaps to the adjacent wrist as if his green stim toy would just magically appear as they both file out of the room on auto-pilot.

 

…but, no, it won’t appear, because two days ago he accidentally snapped it in two, sending its soft pieces into different corners of his room.

 

That was a very bad day for him.

 

And those bad days just seem to continue the longer he goes without properly stimming – without keeping his long kept routine.

 

“I broke it,” he confesses with a little sniff. He can’t really tell where his emotions are at right now, so he avoids looking at anyone’s face as he lumbers down the school hallway. He actually has to concentrate to give his feet any weight – the shoes on his feet feel sort of funny, like they shouldn’t be there. Like they’re hindering something instinctual.

 

“Oh, well,” Gwen takes a harried look around the crowded hallways as she reaches back into her bag, “maybe I have – “

 

“Yoooo, Parker!” A loud, loud _, loud_ voice bellows right next to Peter’s ear as a heavy arm is flung across his shoulders. That tingling, tickling feeling is back, only this time it isn’t on the back of his neck so much as a single slice through his cranium that gives his body weird chills.

 

“Hello, Flash,” Peter says, biting his lip and insides of his mouth quietly. The arm across his back has a very unpleasant feel to it.

 

“Soo, listen,” Flash drawls as he drags Peter farther and farther away from a mildly concerned Gwen. “That thing you do in class all the time? With your little toys? Yea, it’s gotta stop.”

 

“Why?” Peter responds, catty and completely ready to do something distracting and possibly embarrassing and shameless in order to get away. Flash probably thinks that he’s the first person to try and force Peter to stop stimming. Jokes on him. Peter’s met way more ableist jerks than just some muscle head in school.

 

“It’s distracting,” Flash says lightly, matter-of-fact, like he isn’t being a total douchewad right now. His arm sort of tightens across Peter’s neck. “And all that jiggling and twitching can’t be healthy, right?”

 

Peter hazards a painful look up into Flash’s face. It’s much too close, and the lank teen can smell Flash’s skin and breath and clothes – not a pleasant sensory overload to have right now.

 

…but among all of these senses is that look in Flash’s eyes that tells Peter Flash knows _exactly_ what kind of jerk he’s being.

 

Something inside of Peter tightens. It’s an old, familiar feeling.

 

“We’re just concerned for someone like you, _Petey,”_ Flash practically coos as he releases Peter’s shoulder only to spin him around with two arms bracing him against a wall corner. “I mean, we all know that you just can’t control yourself on your own, right?”

 

Peter bows his head and swallows, but the little whining breath he had tried to keep in gets out anyway.

 

It’s so humiliating – he knows what he must look like right now, face all screwed up and breathing out of whack – the perfect picture of ‘the weird kid.’ The weird kid with ugly, uncontrollable emotions and body habits that everybody either makes fun of or pities.

 

And underneath all that is some sort of vindictive anger that always seems to get the best of him right around now. Going by the small smirk of Flash’s face, the other teen knows this as well.

 

So Peter does what usually gets him in trouble by the end of the school day and shoves Flash, barely remembering to pull back his seemingly enhanced strength in time.

 

As Flash reels back and gives Peter a surprised and angry look, Peter’s quick – overwhelmingly quick – eyes catch something dangling from Flash’s pocket.

 

Peter takes a dive, snatches it, and runs the heck away.

.

* * *

 

.

A knock sounds on Peter’s door. It’s the loud, sharp kind, the ones that never fail to make his inner ear tingle and his back muscles spasm with the sound of it.

 

On another note, it means that Uncle Ben is home, and he’s probably heard a pretty watered down version from Aunt May already.

 

“C-come in,” Peter calls weakly, shoving himself further up on his bed until his back is pressed against the wall. He doesn’t try to force himself against the wall any further, the way he’s always liked doing after a stressful day. He’s afraid that he’d accidentally burst through the other side, like some kind of advert for cool-aid.

 

Uncle Ben makes his way in with a stern, yet imploring look on his face, leaving the door open behind him – why older people always seem to think that an open door is better than a closed one never ceases to baffle Peter – and comes to stand near the edge of the bed.

 

“May I sit down, please?” The older man asks politely. Which, again, is something that confuses the stuffing out of Peter – in what world would the kid be able to tell the adult ‘no’ in this situation?

 

Instead of speaking, Peter only jerkily nods his head a few times, then forces himself to stop when it tries to become a repetitive motion. There was still something inherently shameful-feeling about stimming obviously in front of someone who themselves does not stim as well.

 

“Now, you probably know what your aunt already told me,” the older Parker jumps right into it, his voice slightly too loud but still pleasantly deep and scratchy. “Because I’m betting a Yankee dollar that that’s what you told her to tell me, but I’m here to ask you for the truth.”

 

Peter lets out a stressed breath as he brings his knees up high enough to place his face onto them. He begins moving in minute circles – rubbing his mouth around and around and around in a comforting gesture that leaves the texture of his cheap jeans giving his skin pleasant tingles.

 

“That boy you fought with today,” Uncle Ben says, and Peter has to physically jerk himself back from refuting that claim. He didn’t fight – he was attacked, both physical and verbally, but according to the zero tolerance policy at school, both parties were to blame. “Was he making fun of you?”

 

Peter presses cold fingertips to the edges of his black eye, feeling the way the skin softens and dips with slight expressions of pain. He blinks, rapidly, at his Uncle’s searching face.

 

“Peter,” Uncle Ben says lowly, then, “son,” which has Peter breathing in a bit sharply and paying more attention. “Was this the same boy that likes to call you a ‘retard?’”

 

He makes a distressed noise before he can stop it, shoving his face in between his knees and squeezing his eyes shut as hard as they will go, just to feel the pressure of it.

 

 _“Wow,”_ Flash had said as he tripped Peter in the middle of running, “you really are a retard.”

 

It takes a couple of minutes for Peter to stop trying to squeeze his head into oblivion. By the time he comes to, the lights are off and the door is shut, leaving him in blessed silence and darkness that only a clean, closed, _safe_ room can bring.

 

Peter breathes in and out slowly, trying to curb whatever anxiety he has left in his gut while also reveling in the awareness of moving his chest up and down. Another repeated, comforting, pleasant motion.

 

He calms down even further when he scoots slightly to the middle of the bed and begins rocking back and forth. His hands automatically grapple with his wrists for a certain green rubber band, only to halt his every movement as slight bits of panic bloom in his chest.

 

His hands bat around his bed in search of it – surely, he must’ve just set it down and it got lost in the folds of his sheets again –

 

And then his hands hit something familiar, but not.

 

He grasps the thing, delighted when it turns out to be just the right size, and shape, and weight as his green rubber band. The only difference is that it is too rough – he can feel every crack and dip within its small surface area. It reminds him of callouses or dinosaur skin.

 

The hand not holding his new treasure flaps slightly in tired excitement next to his legs. A shot of affection goes through him at the realization that Uncle Ben must’ve left it behind. And then a shot of relief at the news that he wouldn’t have to stalk the older man for weeks until another green band is mistakenly abandoned at the house instead of taken to work to be used as the tool it was made to be.

 

Despite the awful, awful texture, Peter begins working with the rubbery material as soon as he can. He folds in into itself until it can’t fold anymore, reveling in the simple stimming motions while valiantly ignoring the way the rough material drags unpleasantly against his sensitive fingertips. He knows that he’s going to have to use the constant squeezing motions and body oils to soften it back to a more easily handled texture.

 

Peter stops his much-needed stimming in order to slide something out of his pocket. He looks at it guiltily.

 

It’s the rubber band he saw hanging from Flash’s pocket just before he’d been chased across the school grounds and subsequently tripped then beaten. In a desperate moment – perhaps even part of his vindictive anger – Peter had made stealing it and getting away with it his top priority.

 

Now, however, he feels like a class A criminal. His Uncle Ben is such a good person, and Peter… isn’t. He’s ‘the weird kid’ who ‘can’t control himself’ and likes to steal other people’s stuff just to curb his ‘urges.’

 

Peter’s eyes prickle slightly, and he scrubs the sides of his head with the palms of his hands. He feels like such an animal sometimes. He could be accepting and even proud of his autism at certain points, but now? Now he doesn’t understand how anyone could ever accept him, much less go about accepting himself.

 

He desperately hopes that it’s just the bad headspace talking. His life has been slightly too turmutulous lately to add something like self-hate to the list.

 

He looks at the camera, all shiny and well taken care of, that he left home today. It sits innocently on the corner of his computer desk, waiting for him to get appropriately excited at the prospect of photography and take it out for a spin again.

 

It brings the slightest of smiles to Peter’s face, but it feels a bit selfish. That’s just his special interest trying to cloud the forefront of his mind again – taking status as the most important thing when, really, he has other things to think about.

 

So he curls up on his bed and begins stimming with his new, green, and not stolen rubber band. He decides to forgo attempting to be non-verbal around his family tonight; something tainted and shameful stopping him.

.

* * *

 

.

“Morning, Aunt May,” Peter says lightly as he gives his Aunt a side-hug and a quick peck on the forehead.

 

“Oh!” She trills, pleased at her nephew’s obvious physical affection. “I see that Ben gave you a new green bracelet. Did you tell him thank you?”

 

Peter does that thing where he gives Aunt May a toothy, crooked grin and hops out of sight, immediately telling her that he either had been up to something or was about to be.

 

“Not a bracelet,” he dodges with, reaching around her wiry frame to snatch a banana from the semi-full fruit bowl. He usually hates bananas, but this one is practically green with unripe-ness, meaning that he wouldn’t have to deal with the disturbing, mushy, and squishy mouthfeels when eating it.

 

“Now, that’s not ripe yet,” Aunt May tries to chastise him, but he’s already got a giant mouthful and is grinding his forehead into the table.

 

“Then it’s perfect,” he says obtusely, reveling in his newfound control over his strength that allows him to pressure stim normally again.

 

And, well, it _maybe_ has something to do with the camera around his neck and the band on his wrist. He _is_ going to investigate this later, just not right now. He needs to save all of his energy for school, after all.

 

When he’s done with his banana, he stands and tosses the peel in the trash, dancing around Aunt May in the small kitchen as she goes through another doorway to put her rag in the dirty laundry pile.

 

He’s standing in front of the kitchen window when Aunt May’s voice drifts through the house.

 

“Peter? Have you done something with that carton of strawberry ice cream that I just bought?”

 

Peter takes a single look back to where Aunt May will emerge within the next five seconds, then promptly launches himself out the open kitchen window, sticks the landing, then rolls until he’s once again a guilty burrito flush against the concrete of the building.

 

“Fancy seeing you here again,” he tells the familiar banana spider much too close to his face.

 

The banana spider wriggles around in defense.

 

Peter gives it a frank smile. “Yeah, me too.”

 

Something prickles on the back of his neck. He steadfastly ignores it, filing its existence away for later as he takes a photo of the angry black and yellow spider.

.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so - Peter's morals before Uncle Ben dies are sort of lax. He has no (initial) problem with embarrassing Flash in the gym scene, no problem taking non-consensual pictures of Gwen, and seemingly no problem with breaking the glass door and subsequently running off/stealing from that cranky gas station. Which is why I can totally see him desperate enough to steal a replacement stim toy, but feel guilty about it later, especially when his Uncle Ben brings him a new stim toy.
> 
> P.S. "Wow, you really are a retard" is an actual quote of what someone said to me in middle school. Suffice to say, I still hope they choke.


End file.
